In terms of payments digitalization, the healthcare sector lags behind other sectors, particularly when it comes to the purchase of large quantities of medical supplies and equipment.
According to the “B2B Payments in Healthcare Tracker,” despite suppliers’ preference for automated clearing house (ACH) and direct deposit payments, up to 85% of their customers still utilize checks or other paper-based payment methods.
Using outdated payment systems inevitably results in mistakes and late payments, which causes foreseeable conflicts between business partners. And the only way to relieve them is through automation technologies capable of digitizing the whole procurement process from start to finish.
Offering contemporary remedies
There are increasing possibilities to innovate on top of current and developing payment rails for both buyers and suppliers across the business-to-business (B2B) payments landscape. According to an interview with Trina Dutta, vice president and general manager of B2B payments automation and worldwide commercial services at American Express
Dutta asserted that delivering contemporary, “consumerized and intuitive solutions” that are simple to set up and use on a daily basis will bring accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) interactions closer together than ever before for solution providers, like American Express.
Dutta predicted that volumes in commercial cards and other electronic payment methods will rise as a result of the growing usage of AP-focused automation solutions.
There is an increasing requirement to give suppliers access to visibility, effective processing, and a straightforward approach to close out their books for a variety of payment methods and receipts.
Procure-to-Pay Process Automation
The digitization of requisitions, orders, receipts, and payments on a single platform known as the procure-to-pay process can assist minimize paper usage and managing electronic payments like ACH debit and virtual credit cards from a hospital’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
Additionally, automation can improve visibility in the procure-to-pay chain, enabling suppliers to anticipate payments more accurately and deliver on-demand payment information for AR reconciliation.
Automation reduces human error and digitizes the entire procure-to-pay process, making it possible for invoices with exception errors to receive the prompt attention they require. These technologies include artificial intelligence (AI), electronic data interchange (EDI), and robotic process automation (RPA).
